OCR Text |
Show MffiSi BJ Ernest Haycox a &fV- THE STORY SO FAR: Clay Morgan Ha, decided to play a lone hand against Bco Herendeen, a rancher bent on running run-ning the cattle country his own way. The two men have been enemies for years, having first fought over Clay's wife, Ula, wh0 die1 hll"n(! nlm antl believing she ' should have married Herendeen. Morgan is a solitary figure, devoted to nii nine-year-old daughter, Janet. Although Al-though two women, Catherine Grant ,nd Ann McGarrah, are In love with him, they know he cannot forget Llla. Of his former friends, only Hack Breathitt Breath-itt has not gone over to Herendeen's side. Seen camping with Pete Borders, a rustler, he is a fugitive from Herendeen's Heren-deen's men. Gurd Grant, Catherine's brother, hesitated about Joining Herendeen, Heren-deen, but became Morgan's sworn ene-my ene-my when he discovered that Catherine had been to his ranch. When he learns that Herendeen has sent a party out to find Hack and kill him, Clay starts out to find him first. He goes to Freeport, to Kern Case's store, where he thinks he will find Hack. Herendeen arrives, and there is a free-for-all fight. In the midst of the fight, Hack appears. Herendeen Her-endeen and his men are driven ofT, but not before they have set fire to the town. As Clay, Hack and Kern Case watch, the whole town, Including Case's store, burns to the ground. Now continue with the story. 12 'Herendeen has sent over the mountain for the Ryder boys." He said: "I'm glad I crossed your trail. What are you doing?" "I was coming your way. I wanted want-ed to see how you were." "Did you tell Gurd you were coming?" com-ing?" "No." "What's the matter with him?" She lowered her head and drew patterns on the soft forest soil with her finger-point. Her hair glowed darkly in the morning's light, it deepened the color of her cheeks. "I don't know," she said in a reserved re-served voice. She wouldn't look at him during these moments. "It is Herendeen's influence, I suppose." She lifted the soft earth in her hand and let it slide between her fingers. Her face was sweetly sober. so-ber. Her long and fresh-colored lips expressively changed shape when she looked at him. "No explanations, explana-tions, no apologies. That is the way you've always been." "What else can anybody do?" "Nothing, I guess. Only it makes it hard for people to understand you sometimes. To know what is in your head." "You never had any trouble figuring figur-ing me out," he reflected. "Ah, but I have a special gift that way. I know you through and through." They were silently laughing laugh-ing at each other, influenced by an undercurrent which always buoyed them up when together. She turned, lying back on the ground, her body full-shaped against the folds of her riding habit. She pillowed her head with her hands and watched the bright blue patch of sky showing through the pine-tops, speaking in a distant, dreaming voice: "Nothing ever changes. Clay. The earth, the wind or the sun. Or the things I want, or you want." He remembered what Ann McGarrah Mc-Garrah had so swiftly asked him: What had he wanted? Now, not ' knowing what it was, he asked Catherine: Cath-erine: "What do I want?" She said In a faraway tone: "I wish I knew." "What do you want?" She turned her head, so close to him now that he saw the gray flakes of color in her eyes. The dance of laughtet was in them, and an inexpressible in-expressible gravity was in them, both humors blended. It was the way she hid herself from him when she chose. "Never ask a woman's age, never ask what she wants." He said indolently: "I wish I had a steak, with onions. Maybe German Ger-man fried potatoes and a piece of apple pie. Now that's what I want." She said: "Do you remember the night we rode to Freeport in the rain and ate Kern Case's flapjacks and coffee, and played rummy until un-til he got scandalized at our conduct and sent us away? It was awfully dark in the Potholes that night, Clay." "What" ever happened to that brown dress?" She said in a wondering tone, "You still remember it?" Then she added quite gently: "Somewhere in the attic, Clay. It is up there with all the other things I outgrew and put away to forget and never quite forgot. Would you want to go back to those times. Clay?" "No," he said, "I guess not." She said: "There's something else I came up here to tell you. Herendeen has sent over the mountain for the Ryder boys.. They're gunmen, Clay." He said. "Time to go," and held out his hand. His fingers were warm and strong, they had a pressure as she pulled herself half-upright and for a moment, her shoulder softly touching his chest, she watched the dust dancing in a shaft of slanting sunlight, her eyes half-closed. "No," she murmured, "I guess I wouldn't either." "What?" "Go back to old times. We'd do the same things, and make the same mistakes. Nothing changes." She turned her head to him, her lips pressed in soft humor. But the expression on Morgan's face sent the smile away and for this short heady interval of time they were remembering the same things, hard-touched by them, dangerously stirred by them. That old closeness came back, that old reckless, sweet wildness came back and shook them; and for a, moment he was shocked alive by the things her nearness did to him. The past rushed up and he saw her as he had once seen her a girl holding him away with a gay insolence even as her eyes pulled him on. He saw now the faint freckles at the base of her nose and the curve of her eyebrows and the close texture of her skin, gently browned by the sun and the reflection of himself in her pupils. She rose and stepped away from him and did something then that told him of her thoughts; she lifted her chin, her face tightening against a flare of excitement, and pulled her hands behind her back as she had done in those old days when she was afraid of what was to come. "My boy," she said, breathlessness in her throat, "it is time to go." "Back home?" She shook her head. "I'm riding with you. There's something on Long Seven I want to find out. You don't mind. Clay?" He had his awkward moment in mounting with his bad hand. They traveled single-file up the trail to Mogul's plateau, and afterward rode abreast across the dun-yellow surface sur-face of the high meadows, beneath a half warm sun. High on the tawny ribs of the Mogul ridge cattle grazed; a puff of dust rose from the bounding flight of an antelope. Catherine said: "It is a beautiful world, Clay." Turning the foot of the Mogul Mountains, they came upon the Long Seven yard. Janet was waiting wait-ing in the doorway, her hands primly prim-ly folded in front of her dress. Harry Jump and Cap Vermilye were near the corral talking to the nester from Salt Meadow, Fox Willing. These three moved toward Morgan Mor-gan but he ignored them for this moment, mo-ment, caught by this scene of Catherine Cath-erine facing his daughter. Catherine walked forward, tall and pleasant in the sunlight, not smiling but near to a smile. Janet's small hands remained re-mained locked across her dress. Her face held its precise gravity, its unmoved un-moved reserve; her eyes were quite cool yet. Morgan, who knew his daughter thoroughly the shaded meaning in her various degrees of silence and politeness recognized an odd restraint in his daughter at the moment. It was a mirrored resentment, re-sentment, the cause of which he understood un-derstood at once. Somewhere along the last year or two his daughter had absorbed the viewpoint of Ann McGarrah. Somehow Ann McGarrah McGar-rah had mysteriously instilled in Janet her own dislike of Catherine. These were the ways by which women wom-en sent their feelings intuitively across space to other women. Janet Jan-et was Ann's partisan and her small clear face, so exactly neutral, could not quite hide her jealousy. He stood by, quietly angered at Ann McGarrah for what she had done to Janet, knowing he had no way of changing Janet's expression. She was no longer a child to listen implicitly im-plicitly to him. In her own mind, in that shadowland between childhood child-hood and wisdom, were beliefs she held by her own judgment Catherine was at the porch. She said: "I haven't seen you for a very long while, Janet." Janet's voice was slow and cooL "Thank you. Would you like a cup of coffee?" "No," said Catherine, and settled on the steps of the porch. She looked at her hands a moment, drawing a deep breath; she was sober and restrained. re-strained. "No, but thanks. That's a pretty dress. I had one once, almost al-most the same color. I wore it to a lot of dances." "Were you my age then?" asked Janet. "I was older. But at your age I used to dance by myself when nobody no-body was watching." "I do, too," said Janet. "How long did you have to wait before you could go to dances?' She spoke it and then, remembering her father's presence too late, threw him an embarrassed em-barrassed look. Catherine noticed it. She said immediately: im-mediately: "It will seem long, as it did to me, but it really will be so short a time!". Fox Willing moved around to face Morgan. He said, "Mr. Morgan, I rode over to tell you something . . ." (TO BE COXT1MIEDJ CHAPTER XII It was beyond midnight when Clay reached home. Harry Jump, night-hawking night-hawking around the yard, followed him into the kitchen and watched him strip down to the waist and wash. Morgan's cheeks showed the battering of Herendeen's fists. Morgan went up to his bed and lay there, his brain pulsing within its skullcap and strong pain traveling through his left arm from a broken bro-ken finger. It made him remember the older fight. Both of them had been younger men, soon recovering from the misery of that beating. This one would stick, it would be buried physically in them as long as they lived, and the sting of it would never leave their minds. At two in the morning, his broken hand on fire, he dressed and went downstairs; he lighted a lamp in the kitchen and shaved himself for want of something better to do watching the bruised patches on his face slowly slow-ly change color. He stoked up the stove and put on the coffeepot; and sat on the porch in the moon-shot heart of night. Wind drifted across the flats, cold and sweet. Harry Jump appeared from the shadows, saying in his sleepy, irritable voice, "Well, if you're goin' to stay up I'll turn in." Morgan got up from the chair, unable un-able to take the punishment of his hand by sitting stilL He went in and drank his coffee, black and hot, and returned to the yard, pacing out through the long-thrown shadows of the poplars. The weathered juniper poles of the corral showed whitely in the moonlight; across the valley the outline of silence; even the night creatures at last grew still. And so he watched this land, his land, slowly slow-ly turn through the night from glowing glow-ing shapelessness to the first hard shadows of false morning. A streak showed over the eastern hills and the horses began to stir in the corral. At four he heard the cook cross the kitchen, asthmatically coughing; at five, drawn and wire-nerved, Morgan ate breakfast with the crew. He said to Jump, "I'll be in town for a couple hours. Stick close to the house until I get back." Afterwards, all his muscles sore and strained and ragged, he climbed the stairs to Janet's room and stood a moment by her bed. She lay in a curled bundle, both hands drawn near her face. Her lips were soft, almost on the edge of a smile, as though her dreams were pleasant; and this way, unconscious of him, she showed Morgan a childish sweetness that held him there, long-wondering long-wondering and strongly moved. It was that little-girl look, full of faith and belief, which struck . him so hard. It would not, he realized, be with her much longer. He left the room reluctantly, got his horse and lined out for War "Pass, reaching town beyond sunup and going directly direct-ly to Charley Padden's house. Charley was the only doctor in the country, a man turned rough and blunt by the kind of" practice he had, somewhat profane and apparently appar-ently calloused to pain in others. When he saw the broken finger and the bruises on Morgan's face, he said: "The other customer came in before daylight I took four stitches in his lip. This is going to make you squirm, Clay. Want a drink of whisky first?" "No," said Clay, "go ahead and don't talk so damned much." Rounding the bend of the trail, a few minutes later, he saw Catherine Grant dismounted in the trail, waiting. wait-ing. When Morgan dismounted before her her eyes showed him something that warmed him through and through: it was a swift personal invest, in-vest, a little saddened by what he saw, as though his injuries hurt her heart. "Bones McGeen came by the ranch late last night and told us what happened." She watched him Quite closely, one strong line of worry across her forehead. "I was afraid you were badly hurt. I hope Vou paid him back. I hope you smashed the lights out of him!" He managed a grin. "He'll take a beauty prizes for a spell." They had this power to be pleased with each other, to cover up seriousness" serious-ness" with a light, touch-and-go humor. |